The Byzantine world before Islam knew a host of paganisms, both polytheistic and from time to time, because of the hierarchy of their gods, quasi-monotheistic. In the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad referred to those who shared their gods as mushrikūn and must have been, in one form or another, pagans. Considering the ideas of these mushrikūn, the historian has a record of testimony about the angels from whom pagans sought heavenly intercession to help them and reveal to them the invisible operations of heaven. These pagan angels of late antiquity owe their name to the Hebrew mal'ak found in the Bible, which became angelos or messenger in the Septuagint. Muhammad saw himself as a rasūl (messenger) of Islam in pagan Arabia, where malak (without alif) was the Arabic word for angel. The Prophet was well aware that the Arabs around him were expecting angels to confirm his message, but they hadn't seen any. Muhammad himself presented himself only as rasūl, not malak. In Greek, such a messenger was no longer called angelos, because other words had replaced this ancient word, e.g. apostolos among Hellenic-speaking Christians and nuntius in Latin, where angelus meant only angel. What is striking about these title transitions is the use of the words angelos and angelus as epithets for the pagan gods themselves. These are the angel-gods we see in the epigraphy of Lebanon, Jordan and Asia Minor, and also in Western Latin in Italy and Romania. Angel-gods suggest that the traditional interpretation of a divine name, such as Malakbel in Palmyra, is best explained as Ange-Bêl rather than Ange de Bêl.
A coin from al Jî near Petra features the angel-god Idarouma, hand raised, who received a Haurean dedication at Sammet el Baradan. The inscription states that the dedication was offered to Ilaalge, god of Gaia (al Jî), and his angel Idarouma. The image of this angel with his hand raised on a coin in the place reserved for a god proves that this is an angel-god. It can be compared to the Theion Angelos (or Theion Angelikon) from Caria in Asia Minor. A new perspective, which is becoming increasingly fashionable, according to which pagan angels and even angel-gods are merely minor divinities in the service of a single great god - and therefore that the paganism of late antiquity was merely a pagan monotheism - remains indefensible. The Koran does not support such an assumption, and the Koranic goddesses of the pre-Islamic pantheon (al Lat, al Uzza, al Manat) are not susceptible to identification with the daughters of Allah. The pagans of late antiquity who ranged themselves against the Prophet were fully polytheistic.
